Thanks, you make some interesting points, particularly about being a first-mover. When talking about "startups we've heard of" you may well be right, I could certainly see how that could work. But in general, the companies we've heard of are the ones who survived long enough to become well known, and in that case, I suspect that their code is very maintainable, which implies many aspects of "good" code. I'd especially expect the companies known for their software to have good code, unlike companies that do other things, but happen to have developers to support their business.
But in general, the companies we've heard of are the ones who survived long enough to become well known
True!
and in that case, I suspect that their code is very maintainable
Unfortunately, there's no relation between a code's maintainability and its business viability. For example, if that were true, then there would be a correlation between beautiful codebases and codebases which make money. In my experience there is no such correlation.
Businesses generally maintain their codebases by hiring people to work on it rather than adopting good practices from the start (so that they don't have to hire more people to work on it). That's why startups have another advantage: they can work much faster than big companies, because big companies generally have to deal with ten metaphorical tons of code bloat, which slows them down almost as much as their bureaucratic nature.
